Posted
by
Soulskill
on Monday October 04, 2010 @05:45PM
from the making-it-go-away dept.

darthcamaro writes "Red Hat has settled another patent case with patent holding firm Acacia. This time the patent is US Patent #6,163,776, 'System and method for exchanging data and commands between an object oriented system and relational system.' While it's great that Red Hat has ended this particular patent threat, it's not yet clear how they've settled this case. The last time Red Hat tangled with Acacia they won in an Texas jury trial. 'Red Hat routinely addresses attempts to impede the innovative forces of open source via allegations of patent infringement,' Red Hat said in a statement. 'We can confirm that Red Hat, Inc and Software Tree LLC have settled patent litigation that was pending in federal court in the Eastern District of Texas.'"

Posted
by
Soulskill
on Friday September 03, 2010 @05:10PM
from the eula-doesn't-count dept.

An anonymous reader writes "TorrentFreak has shed some light on the dark practice of installing stealth-mode P2P clients during game downloads and using unsuspecting gamers' PCs as 'bandwidth slaves.' The clients operate in the background and largely go unnoticed until problems arise that are caused by overactive uploading/seeding. While the Akamai NetSession Interface and Pando Media Booster are specifically called out, there appear to be other offenders as indicated in the comments left by TorrentFreak readers. A publisher called Solid State Networks is putting out a call for an industry-wide 'best practices' effort to promote transparency, control and privacy on behalf of gamers who are otherwise being abused for their bandwidth without their consent."

gauharjk writes: In one of the most serious war-crimes cases to emerge from the Afghanistan war, five soldiers from a Stryker infantry brigade based at Joint Base Lewis-McChord are now charged with murder for their alleged roles in killing three Afghan civilians.

Army Staff Sgt. Calvin Gibbs formed a "kill team" with a close group of US soldiers to carry out random executions of Afghans.

Gibbs, of Billings, Mont., is a veteran of two previous war-zone tours — one in Afghanistan and a second in Iraq. In the fall, he joined the 2nd Battalion, 1st Infantry Regiment, replacing a squad leader who had been injured by an explosion.

He allegedly boasted about "stuff" he had gotten away with in Iraq and discussed plans for killing Afghans with a small circle of soldiers, according to statements by other soldiers.

All five soldiers are awaiting court-martial proceedings. If convicted, they face the possibility of life imprisonment or death.

FlorianMueller writes: In a recent Slashdot discussion, a Linux evangelist from Google, Jeremy Allison, said that "Google submitted an anti-software patent brief in the Bilski case." He disclosed his affiliation and encouraged double-checking. I have performed a detailed analysis of Google's amicus curiae brief in re Bilski. While it cites some patent-critical literature, the document stops far short of advocating the abolition of software patents. The brief supports the idea that patent law should expand according to technological progress. It complains about some software patents being too abstract and others making only a "conventional" use of a computer, but under patent law, that doesn't mean that all software is conventional by definition. Google's own patents, such as the PageRank patent, are (at least intended to be) non-abstract and non-conventional. Is anyone aware of Google ever having spoken out against the patentability of all software, including the software Google itself patents every day?

adeelarshad82 writes: The rumors are now reality, Samsung showed the world its first glimpse of the Samsung Galaxy Tab, the company's new 7-inch tablet. Samsung Mobile will release more information about the Galaxy Tab on September 2 in advance of IFA Berlin 2010. Tab will run on Android 2.2 and feature full Web-browsing and video calling. The information given by the company implied that the Galaxy Tab will sport an HD screen for video, Flash support, support for e-books, possible GPS navigation, and PC linking.

iqrash writes: The availability of first alpha release of Fedora 14 "Laughin" has been announced by Dennis Gilmore (see the release announcement). The final release of much awaited Fedora 14 is due in September this year, and this is the first chance for the users to see how the upcoming release of Fedora will be like. The main goal of an alpha release is to find and fix bugs, the alpha version is designed in such a way as to help the Fedora team to identify bugs....

Paul-Threatpost writes: Malware may be difficult to define but, as former U.S. Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart famously quipped about pornography, "you know it when you see it." At least that's the position being taken by Google and anti malware firms about two applications designed for mobile phones running Google's Android operating system. Now the developer is crying foul.

Posted
by
CmdrTaco
on Monday July 19, 2010 @10:44AM
from the just-wait-it-out-i-guess dept.

FlorianMueller writes "The FreeType project celebrates the expiration of Apple's TrueType bytecode patents. The open source font rendering engine now has the bytecode technology enabled by default. The relevant code existed for some time, but the project felt forced to disable it and advise everyone not to use it due to patent encumbrance. The 20-year maximum of validity of software patents is long, but sometimes the stuff that becomes available is still useful. The Unisys GIF patent was an example. And anything open-sourced 20 years ago would also be patent-free by now (except for the code that has since been added)."

Posted
by
Soulskill
on Monday July 12, 2010 @12:46PM
from the neverending-can-of-worms dept.

An anonymous reader writes "Not a month goes by where we don't hear about a theft of some organization's laptop containing sensitive personal information, not to mention the even more frequent — but often kept secret — breaches into company networks and databases. It is definitely true that you should be responsible for the security of your information when you handle it, but what happens when the theft of your information is not your fault? You have handed over this information to a company or organization and trusted them to keep is secure, but they failed. They might notify you of the breach or theft, and they might even set up a credit monitoring service for you for a year or two, but the problem is that this information may be used years from now. Is it fair that you have to worry for decades and pay for further credit monitoring when they are to blame for your information ending up in the wrong hands?"

averyzoe writes: I was reading a study recently about...ooooh! Pretty bird! Um, where was I? Oh, yeah, there was this study, and it was about how video games...um video games--Hey! Did you guys see that new movie? What? Oh--the study. Yeah, it was about video games affecting attention span. Something about kids and even college-aged students having more attention problems the more video games they play. I don't know what they're talking abou...Hey! Scooby Doo is on! Seriously though, this is a real scientific study conducted by three psychologists at Iowa State University.....found a correlation between video game and television viewing and attention problems. AveryZoe at GoozerNation reports.

An anonymous reader writes: Experimental UK designer Suzanne Lee "grows" clothes from bacteria. She has developed a method for growing clothing from yeast, a pinch of bacteria, and several cups of sweetened green tea. From this microbial soup, fibers begin to sprout and propagate, eventually resulting in thin, wet sheets of bacterial cellulose that can be molded to a dress form. As the sheets dry out, overlapping edges “felt” together to become fused seams. When all moisture has evaporated, the fibers develop a tight-knit, papyrus-like surface.

Posted
by
Soulskill
on Friday July 09, 2010 @02:35PM
from the penguins-with-guns dept.

Trailrunner7 writes "A security expert has released a stripped-down Ubuntu distribution designed specifically for reverse-engineering malware. The OS, called REMnux, includes a slew of popular malware-analysis, network monitoring and memory forensics tools that comprise a very powerful environment for taking apart malicious code. REMnux is the creation of Lenny Zeltser, an expert on malware reverse engineering who teaches a popular course on the topic at SANS conferences. He put the operating system together after years of having students ask him which tools to use and what works best. He originally used Red Hat Linux, but recently decided that Ubuntu was a better fit. REMnux has three separate tools for analyzing Flash-specific malware, including SWFtools, Flasm and Flare, as well as several applications for analyzing malicious PDFs, including Didier Stevens' analysis tools. REMnux also has a number of tools for de-obfuscating JavaScript, including Rhino debugger, a version of Firefox with NoScript, JavaScript Deobfuscator and Firebug installed, and Windows Script Decoder."